Authors: Henry Williamson
The days went on. The love poems Julian brought were not so clear as the early ones. There was strain in them.
“In a way, yes, I suppose you’re right, old boy,” Julian retorted, with a shade of the old arrogance. “But it’s good poetry—I
know
it is. You judge by your subjective feelings: but there is a classical tradition, you know!” Phillip felt that it was good poetry when Julian told him it was; but afterwards it seemed somehow to be doubtful.
Rows of new books stood on the shelves of Irene’s cottage. Mrs. O’Malley was by now barely on speaking terms with Julian. One of the books,
A
Shropshire
Lad,
bore the inscription,
To
Dublin,
because
her
cooking
is
so
good.
The companion-help, who had come from Dublin, thought that both rude and patronising, and said so.
Julian’s entire imaginative life appeared to be devoted to Irene. “He writes upstairs in the little dark room, and rushes down to read what he has written to Irene. How she has the patience to listen to him, I can’t imagine,” remarked Mrs. O’Malley. Phillip did not try to explain, although he felt like defending Julian.
After supper Mrs. O’Malley and he sometimes walked to the high ground marked by the church spire on the horizon to see the after-sunset. They sat on the churchyard wall and stared at the vastness of fading light to the north-west beyond the coast of Cornwall, leaving the Channel tides grey, sad, empty. “You’re a Celt, like me,” she said. “You’ll always be in love—with the wrong person.”
“My great-grandmother was Irish,” he said, wondering what exactly she meant.
“Ah, that’s where your feeling comes from.”
*
It was timeless midsummer: white owls quartered the wheat now in flag: hues of sunset were steely in the north-west long after midnight: lime-washed cottages below in the village glimmered palely to the mystic summer dawns. Sometimes Phillip returned to sleep on a haystack with a spaniel puppy he had been given by Porky. The pale stars and the moon, the calmness of the night gave an unearthly feeling of tranquillity and peace. Yet it was as though a stranger within him often sighed, longing for the dream-Annabelle whose presence would change the beauty between the set and rise of sun to warmth and peace. From vain contemplation of this dream his mind transformed his shadow-self into a star-wanderer of the centuries of light; but without consolation. He was neither of the
natural world nor apart from it, as he had felt before the coming of Annabelle.
*
Julian’s mat-beating in the early morning ceased. So did the conventional tutoring of Phillip’s pupil.
“History, as taught hitherto in Europe, is no good. History must be rewritten from the viewpoint that wars and strife derive mainly from the fertility or barrenness of soils. Until it is written you will be wasting your time with kings, dates, and endless wars. Let’s go for a walk, we’ll both learn more that way.”
“I know.”
The two spent most of the time out of doors observing the natural world. They read some of Conrad together, and miscellaneous poetry. He told her the story of Francis Thompson, the one poet whose life he particularly knew.
She was attentive, understanding, composed, unemotional.
“You’re too young to understand,” he said, once. “Also, you have no feeling. You are an Icelandic, or a Finnish, type—from cold, cold countries.”
The blue eyes searched him through; he had to evade their directness.
“Did you like the verse I quoted, Barleybright?”
“Yes, P.M. I love the words. And I have feelings, you know. Or rather, you don’t know.”
“But the meaning?”
“I know what the poet means, behind the words.”
“Oh Barley, I shouldn’t be reading sad poetry to you! You belong to a new generation, a new world—I’m part of the sad, frustrated old world. I’m rubbish.”
“You’re not rubbish. Not with me, anyway.”
“You’re a funny girl. How much do you
really
know, I wonder? The sun is shining—if you know that, you’ve got all the wisdom of the ages in your mind. Let’s go for a walk! I’m getting morbid!”
“You’re not morbid. You think of me as a child, don’t you? So you don’t believe me.” She was by his side, waiting.
“Now, I think, a lesson in natural history. Let’s climb up to the owls in Farmer Crew’s hayloft at Barton Hole, down the lane to the sea.”
“Yes!”
Barton Hole lay in a coombe leading off the main valley: a cluster of thatched buildings around a cattle yard, with a cider
press and a circular root-house containing a slicing machine, seasonally turned by a horse. An owl-hole had been left when the farm was built, for the birds to enter and take mice.
They climbed up into the loft, half-filled with last year’s hay. Part of a tree branch, green with age and tunnelled by beetles, supported the ridge, embedded in the gable ends.
At the far end the hay had been cleared. As they crept over the floor joists, wary of going through the rotten boards, a spread of white arose in the dimness as the mother owl flew up to perch upon a tie-beam. A chirruping came from the darkness by the eaves. The owl uttered a shriek and flew past them, they heard no sound of her wings, only the wind on their faces. A blackbird cried its shrill alarm outside. The two were now crouching on a litter of small dry bones, fur, and the blue armour of beetle wings. When their eyes were used to the dim light they saw the nest. Three young birds were almost grown, standing there in plumage yellow, grey, and white. Their baby-fluff moved in the least movement of air. As they crawled nearer the three owlets ran away.
Two more, about a fortnight younger, squatted still. Their bodies were dough-like, covered with white fluffy down. Phillip pointed out the shape of head and beak like a vulture’s. The roundness of the face and head of the adult bird was due to thick feathering. Barley picked them up and sat them on her lap; then they saw a still smaller pair, and when these were added to her lap, there remained yet another pair, new-hatched and blind, so small that both could be put in the palm of one hand. While she nursed them, Phillip counted about fifty mice and voles and young rats lying around the nest. There must have been several sackfuls of bones and fur lying about; yet the owlery smelt fresh. There was no waste here, he said, as around a hawk’s nest or eyrie: the owls swallowed their prey whole, and the castings or pellets of indigestible stuff thrown up from their crops were clean feather, bone, and fur.
He borrowed a basket to take two fledgelings back to show Irene. The farmer’s spinster sister, who kept the dairy, pale of face and gaunt, came out of her cool room with its heavy slate shelves whereon stood earthenware pans of milk, to see the little birds. She walked stiffly, and had woeful eyes; but was kind and quiet in manner.
“Vancy that, now!” she remarked, in her craking voice. “Pretty birds, I reckon, and do a lot of good catching mice, they
say. ’Tes wonderful what a lot of different things there be in the world, ban’t it, midear?”, smiling her sweet, crooked smile at the girl.
“Owls are beautiful things!” said Barley.
“There now, vancy that!” exclaimed the old woman, with a smile.
Having shown the young owlets around—“What a chap you are, Phil!” from Julian—they returned and put them back. Coming down again, there stood the farmer, gnarled like one of his cankered cider-apple trees. He was deaf, so Phillip shouted at him, “I climbed up without asking your permission, I’m afraid! Please forgive me!”
The farmer’s mouth drew down and open, his eyes, too. He took a long suck of his old pipe, removed it, and with eyes now wide-open “Aw haw haw!” he cried solemnly, then poked Phillip in the ribs. “Aw haw!” he guffawed. “You med go up-along wi’ th’ l’il maid whenever you’m a mind to, zur, I’m only too plaized vor tew zee ’ee! ’Tes nothing to me what others speak agin ’ee, you pay your way, and I’ve nothin’ to zay agin ’ee, midear! You come any time you’m a mind to! You’m welcome!”
Phillip wondered what he meant, by others speaking “agin” him; but in the company of Barley it seemed not worth bothering about. Yet she said as they walked back, “People always talk, I learned that in Malaya, P.M. You won’t ever let them upset you, will you? Promise me?”
“Good heavens no, Barley! I mean, I don’t mind what people say about me”; while he wondered if Irene’s odd reception of him when first she had come to the village had been due to Julian telling her of his month in prison after the war. After the deliberate twisting of the ‘Dear Man of the Sands’ letter he wouldn’t put anything past Julian.
*
During the next few weeks Phillip and his young
protégée
visited many places together, Barley riding on the carrier of the Norton. She had a natural sense of balance. Once they went across Dartmoor to visit Willie’s cottage in North Devon, starting soon after sunrise. It was empty, as before. Another day they went to a long, winding valley-village on the coast along the Severn Sea, to explore old silver mines and eat strawberries in the fields above, as many as they could eat for a shilling. They walked over the Chains of Exmoor, she riding on his back across water-plashes
where the white tufts of cotton-grass trembled above the bog.
She told him of her grannie’s villa in the Pyrénées, of ski-ing in the snow by the empty huts of peasants who spent the winter in the valley villages; of how every peasant was allowed one tree a year for firing, and how all except the luckiest would bargain afterwards for a bigger tree, getting one another drunk.
They walked over the sandhills to an estuary, watching crews of salmon boats putting out and hauling their nets; they bathed in rocky pools left by the loading of gravel into wooden barges. Through her bathing dress, now too small for her, he saw that her shape had budded. Her tumbled hair fell on her brown shoulders, her arms were thin and brown too, she smiled widely, she was delight itself as with a shake of her curls she poised a moment before plunging into pale green water through which she seemed to slip without splash or effort. “Come in, P.M., it’s lovely!” as she rolled over on her back.
While in the sun with her, the image of Annabelle vanished; Annabelle’s beauty was for the night. If only Annabelle were Barley—swimming and diving with an ease beyond premeditation!
The girl would have swum across the channel to the fishing village had he not told her of the swift currents. She laughed: there were no currents, she said—it was slack water of low tide! But she thought no more of crossing, because he was anxious.
After disporting in the warm pools they picked up their things and started to walk back in their bathing dresses over sandhills that rang in the heat. Soon they were dry, the salt white on brown flesh, the sands burning the soles of their feet. He felt himself to have no body, to be part of the sea and the pale blue sky pierced by larksong.
They arrived home late, after crossing Dartmoor by moonlight, which quenched the glimmer of the new acetylene headlamp—it was nearly eleven when Irene had given Barley a hot bath and tucked her up in bed. Where was Julian?
After cooking Phillip a sea-trout, and putting it before him, Irene closed the window, which had been open at the top.
“I feel most awfully mean, P.M.,” she began, “especially after the way I treated you when I thought you had been unfair in telling me about Julian so soon after we met, when also you appeared to be talking about me to him.”
“I think I was horribly tactless, Irene.”
“We’ll let bygones be bygones, shall we?”
When the meal was over, and coffee brought in, she said, “Do tell me, P.M., has Julian any money of his own? Between ourselves, I lent him forty pounds, as he seemed to be in difficulties through default of his guardian. You see, I’ve been rather hard up lately, paying off one thing and another, and I’ve asked Julian several times if he could manage to repay the loan. His replies puzzle me. He has a different excuse each day. I can’t make him out. Are all writers the same, unable to discern reality from imagination?”
Phillip told himself that this time he would be careful not to be involved. “Well, you know, I suppose all of us tend to go along a single-track of the mind, which is a form of egotism or selfishness.”
“You put it very nicely, P.M., but the position isn’t happy here. Julian is such a contradictory mixture. Bridget can’t bear him in the house, and I don’t want her to go. But most of all I cannot bear the idea of a friend lying to me. There’s no necessity to be untruthful. Why do men——?” Appealingly she looked at him. He saw that she was tired. “Do you think I’m an awful fool, P.M.?”
“Certainly not. I think you’re very decent. In fact, too decent. I understand exactly how you feel.”
There was a movement at the top of the stairs. Barley in home-made pyjamas stood there. “Hullo, darling! I left you in bed, naughty one! Did you enjoy your day with nice, kind P.M.? Been stealing my puma cub, has he? What did he tell you about this time?”
“He told me about salmon, about the War, and how a four-stroke engine works, Mummie.”
Irene gave Phillip a smile in which was a suggestion of bewilderment, pride, amazement, admiration. “The new generation, P.M.! Direct, straight … none of the inner complications that grieve you and me—but you’re a boy still, P.M., with a wonderful future——”
Perhaps it was the strong sunlight of the long day, or the tiredness; or the unexpected sympathy, but he could not help tears coming into his eyes. Life seemed to be but a making and a breaking of friendships, ties, affections. Most people seemed to be rootless; fallen between two worlds. When Irene went away, as she had spoken of going, where would his life be then?
“P.M.’s tired too, isn’t he, darling? Let’s give him a peg and
send him home to his camp-bed. The sun was very strong today—your hair, my baby, is very nearly bleached white, and oh, so full of sand! I must wash it tomorrow.”
“Oh, Mummie, I do so hate my hair being washed. And I wasn’t tired, really. You can’t get tired in this sun, it isn’t like the Far East, Mummie.”
“Well, run wild while you can. Now to bed, my sleepy-head. Kiss P.M. too, darling.” A touch of lips on his forehead, and she was gone.